A whimsical idea struck me.  Imagine a creature, highly intellectual, but without the power of sight, brought up in darkness, receiving impressions solely by hearing and touch.  Suppose him introduced into a room such as mine, and endeavouring to form an impression of the kind of creature who inhabited it.  Chairs, tables, even a musical instrument he could interpret; but what would he make of a writing-table and its apparatus?  How would he guess at the use of a picture?  Strangest of all, what would he think of books?  He would find in my room hundreds of curious oblong objects, opening with a sort of hinge, and containing a series of laminae of paper, which he would discern by his delicacy of touch to be oddly and obscurely dinted.  Yet he would probably never be able to frame a guess that such objects could be used for the communication of intellectual ideas.  What would he suppose them to be?

The thought expanded before me.  What if we ourselves, in this world of ours, which seems to us so complete, may really be creatures lacking some further sense, which would make all our difficulties plain?  We knock up against all sorts of unintelligible and inexplicable things, injustice, disease, pain, evil, of which we cannot divine the meaning or the use.  Yet they are undoubtedly there!  Perhaps it is only that we cannot discern the simplicity and the completeness of the heavenly house of which they are the furniture.  Fanciful, of course; but I am inclined to think not wholly fanciful.

May 10, 1891.

The question is this:  Is there a kind of peace, of tranquillity, attainable in this world, which is proof against all calamities, sufferings, sorrows, losses, doubts?  Is it attainable for one like myself, who is sensitive, apprehensive, highly strung, at once confident and timid, alive to impressions, liable to swift changes of mood?  Or is it a mere matter of mental, moral, and physical health, depending on some balance of qualities, which may or may not belong to a man, a balance which hundreds cannot attain to?

By this peace, I do not mean a chilly indifference, or a stoical fortitude.  I do not mean the religious peace, such as I see in some people, which consists in holding as a certainty a scheme of things which I believe to be either untrue or uncertain—­and about which, at all events, no certainty is logically and rationally possible.

The peace I mean is a frame of mind which a man would have, who loved passionately, who suffered acutely, who desired intensely, who feared greatly; and yet for whom, behind love and pain, desire and fear, there existed a sort of inner citadel, in which his soul was entrenched and impregnable.